God Justifieth the Ungodly

But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. ROMANS 4:5

When Spurgeon sat down to write a small book for people who were not yet Christians, he did not begin with the love of God, or the beauty of Christ, or the misery of sin. He began with a phrase from Romans that most readers pass over, and he called his first real chapter by its name: God Justifieth the Ungodly. He thought it the most astonishing sentence in the Bible, and he wanted every seeker to meet it before anything else.

An unlikely title

Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say that God justifies the godly, or the nearly godly, or the ungodly once they have improved. It says He justifies the ungodly, and it gives this to God as a kind of title. In All of Grace Spurgeon points out that the enemies of the gospel had long made this very charge against it — that it receives wicked people — and that Scripture, far from denying the charge, adopts it. God takes the name to Himself. The Lord, he writes, “comes, not because we are just, but to make us so: he justifieth the ungodly.”

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. 1 TIMOTHY 1:15

Most people, Spurgeon observed, carry in them a natural legality. We assume that God’s favour must follow some goodness in us, and so we either try to produce it or despair of producing it. Both responses keep the sinner away from Christ. The self-righteous man thinks he does not need justifying; the despairing man thinks he cannot be justified. The verse cuts across both. It is precisely the ungodly for whom the gospel is intended, and therefore nobody is too ungodly for it.

What the word means

Spurgeon was careful about the word justify, because a great deal depends on it. In a sermon on Romans 3:24, Justification by Grace, he explains that it is a courtroom word. To justify a man is not to make him better but to declare him righteous in the eye of the law. An earthly court can do this only if the accused is innocent. It can pardon a guilty man, but it cannot justify him. “The Queen may pardon him,” he says, “but she cannot justify him.” The crime remains his crime.

That is what makes the gospel so staggering. The verdict against us has been given, and it is guilty. And yet God justifies. In the same sermon he calls it the wonder of wonders “that we are proved guilty, and yet we are justified.” No earthly judge could do it without corrupting justice.

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. ROMANS 3:24

The answer lies in the last words of that verse: through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God does not declare the guilty righteous by pretending they are something they are not. He declares them righteous because the penalty of their sin has been borne by another, and the righteousness of that other is reckoned to them. The next chapter of this book is about that substitution. Here the point is simpler. Justification is a verdict, and it is God’s verdict. It rests on what Christ has done, not on what we have become.

It is God that justifieth

Spurgeon drew great comfort from Paul’s question at the end of Romans 8.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. ROMANS 8:33

If you justify yourself, he says bluntly in All of Grace, you are simply deceiving yourself. If you ask other people to justify you, their verdict is worth very little; they will praise you for small favours and slander you for less. But if God justifies you, the matter is closed. There is no higher court. The accuser may bring his charges, and conscience may bring its memories, but the Judge Himself has pronounced.

He admitted that the truth astonished him personally. “None but God would ever have thought of justifying me,” he writes. “I am a wonder to myself.” He pointed to Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, who became the greatest preacher of justification by faith. Nobody but God would have thought of justifying such a man. Nobody but God could have done it.

Why this is good news for you

The practical force of the doctrine, as Spurgeon pressed it, is that it makes the gospel available now, to anyone. If God justifies the ungodly, then you qualify. You do not have to wait until you are better, because the gospel is not addressed to the better. You do not have to wait until you feel forgiven, because justification is a verdict given in heaven, not a sensation produced in you.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. ISAIAH 1:18

Spurgeon knew that some would hear this as licence: if God justifies the ungodly, why not stay ungodly? He answered the objection a few chapters later in All of Grace, in Concerning Deliverance from Sinning, and his answer is worth holding alongside this one. The God who justifies also renews. The same grace that gives the verdict gives a new heart, and a person who has truly been forgiven so much does not want to go back to what nearly destroyed him. Justification is not the whole of salvation. But it is the door, and the door is open to the ungodly.

A word of honest qualification

Christians have understood justification in different ways, and Spurgeon stood firmly in the Reformation tradition that sees it as a legal declaration grounded in Christ’s righteousness reckoned to the believer. Some readers will frame it differently. What almost every Christian tradition confesses, however, is the heart of Spurgeon’s point: that we do not earn God’s acceptance, and that grace comes to the undeserving. He could also sound, in places, as if assurance should follow immediately and completely on believing, and some sensitive souls have been troubled because theirs did not. He knew better elsewhere, and he was tender with the doubting. The verdict does not depend on the feeling of it.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. ROMANS 8:1

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Romans 4:1–8 slowly. Underline every phrase that tells you what God does and every phrase that tells you what man does not do.

2. Ask yourself which of the two errors you lean towards: thinking you do not need justifying, or thinking you cannot be justified. Confess it by name.

3. When your conscience accuses you this week, answer it with Romans 8:33–34 rather than with a list of your recent good behaviour.

4. Think of someone you have privately written off as too far gone. Pray for them by name, remembering Saul of Tarsus.

5. Write down, in one sentence, the difference between being pardoned and being justified, and thank God for both.

A PRAYER

Holy Father, I am ungodly, and I have spent too long pretending otherwise or despairing because of it.

I bring You no goodness of my own. I believe on You who justifieth the ungodly, and I rest in the verdict You have given for Christ’s sake.

When the accuser speaks, let me answer with Your word: It is God that justifieth.

And let the wonder of it make me humble, grateful and glad to live for You. Amen.